I have scripts that write to data files and then download them to a client machine; all was working perfectly until users upgraded to Perl version 5.8.3. Now it appears that every record of data that is downloaded has an extra LINE FEED character chr(10) on appended to the end. This causes issues because I return the size of the file using -s and then on the client side I perform a FileLen operation that returns the file in size (excluding these extra line feeds). How has Perl's syntax changed? Is the \n for newline behaving differently? Please HELP as this is extremely urgent! Thanks!!!

I can't think offhand of any changes that might have caused the problems that you are seeing, but you minght like to take a look at the perldelta manual pages for 5.8.0, 5.8.1, 5.8.2 and 5.8.3 for more details of the changes in those versions.

It appears as though on SOME servers, after printing data to a file with "\n" at the end, once I download the file there are ONLY line feeds delimiting the records whereas on the server it appears to be carraiage return + line feeds....any ideas here? This is very frustrating as on the server I perform a -s on the file, then return the result of this (file size) to the client. The client then, after the download, performs a file size check as well to ensure that the whole file was successfully downloaded, but its value is off by 1 character PER record (missing carriage return).

Thats a nice article. Here is some more information that I have that may help. When the data is written to the file on the server, which is the local systems windows web server, it looks fine in notepad, BUT when I download the file, FROM THE SAME SYSTEM, it seems to strip away the CR character...any more ideas? The transfer is taking place on the same machine...